


They can't save us now

by Trash



Category: Linkin Park
Genre: AU, Angst, M/M, Talk of Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 17:08:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somebody once told Brad that the only thing you can be certain of in life is death – when you meet somebody you can guarantee one day they’ll be worm food</p>
            </blockquote>





	They can't save us now

Brad sits in his cubicle playing with the Rubik’s cube he stole from somebody six cubicles over. He should feel guilty, but whoever it was had loads of Dutch girly magazines fanned out across their desk, so he doubts they’ll miss it much.

His headset makes his hair flat and his eight hours shifts run from ten at night until six in the morning. More people call at night, and it’s Brad’s job to deal with them. A lot of the people working here are volunteers, so Brad’s five dollars an hour doesn’t make him very popular.

Fuck them. Volunteering is for rich people.

A call comes in and the ringing is the start of a long, long night full of people Brad doesn’t want to deal with. The problem with this place is they don’t even get a computer. Just a cubicle you couldn’t swing a cat in and a phone.

All he wants it to surf the net, play solitaire whilst he listens to the person on the line.

At least he has his Rubik’s cube.

***

Chester pushes his way from the dance floor to the bar. The girl beside him, she leans in close and presses her mouth to his ear, her tongue lapping at the lobe and her teeth tugging on his earring. He pulls away and smiles weakly, “You’re barking up the wrong tree, darling.” He says, and turns back to the bar.

The pills are wearing off and he needs another hit of…anything. So he orders a vodka shot that tastes like birthday cake and tries to remember the last time he had a birthday cake, the last time he had any sort of party with any kind of friends.

He doesn’t know when his life became such a mess. Things used to make sense. He used to have a steady job, he used to have friends. Now all he has is waking up every morning and wanting to die. He has cuts so deep on his arms that they bleed through the three bandages around them. For sure the scars will be ugly and obtrusive and they’ll match his personality fucking perfectly.

Another drink. His stomach is churning and he knows he should stop. Spends too much time throwing up on his own shoes. And once upon a time somebody would be there to get him some water, clap him on the back and laugh gently at how stupid he was. But now all he has is memories of a time when things were better.

Nothing stings like abandonment. Not even self-mutilation that leaves you with so much blood loss you can’t stand.

Another drink.

And then he’s shoving through the crowd again.

Being here. The pounding of the tasteless bass, and the way nobody is looking at him in any way other than disgust. All of it. It leaves him staggering outside.

The cold air hits him and he wraps his arms around himself, blinking back drunken tears as he stumbles down the street. He needs to hail a cab but his hands have gone numb. The alcohol, the drugs, who knows? It starts to rain and just, isn’t this perfect? Couldn’t this be a fucking movie version of his life?

More than once he trips and the final time he slams into a phone booth and that’s it. He just can’t anymore. The rain is picking up and he pulls the door open. Inside is a load of shit graffiti and the stink of piss brought to life by the rain leaking in through the light fixture on the roof.

This is his life.

He leans against the wall and cries. He stares at the desperate people’s numbers scrawled on the class and he cries.

And then he sees the sticker and he figures whatever, it’s worth a try, because he’s so close to just jumping under a bus, why not?

He fishes a coin out of his pocket and drops it into the phone, picks up the receiver and dials the number in front of him.

***

Brad is practically asleep by the time the phone rings through to his extension. It’s three in the morning. He needs coffee, a piss, and then to go to bed. His Rubik’s cube is all blue on one side and then fucked up everywhere else.

And his phone is still ringing.

He takes a deep breath and answers with his optimistic, trained counsellor voice. “Suicide hotline.” He says.

There’s nothing but the sound or rain and someone crying really hard down the line. And Brad says, “Hello? Are you there?” Then, “Let me help you.”

“I d-don’t think you can help me.”

“Let me try.” Brad says, twisting the Rubik’s cube until the blue side is broken up by reds and whites. Fuck. He thought he had it. Maybe not.

“What’s your name?” The crying voice asks.

You’re not supposed to give out your name. It’s creepy. You’re not supposed to do a lot of things. So he puts down the cube and says, “I’m Brad. Who are you?”

“No one special. No one who will be missed.”

Usually Brad would agree. He tells callers to fuck it, kill themselves. What is the point anyway? Life does suck. We do not live in a beautiful world. He tells them either kill yourself or don’t, but if you walk away alive tonight you have to tell everybody to get fucked tomorrow – everybody who trod on you, tell them to suck a dick.

But tonight he goes, “No really, what’s your name?”

And the caller sniffs, pauses, “Chester,” he says.

“Chester…okay let me tell you a story. Will you stay with me?”

“Uh-huh.” He says, and drops another coin in the phone.

“I used to work for an internet support call line. I didn’t work for the company themselves, none of us did, we were just paid to deal with their fuck ups. Then the company goes bankrupt and most people quit but our bosses, the people who were employed to employ us decided that a suicide hotline was the way to go.” Brad says. “Are you still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay good. So we turn into a suicide hotline and the few of us who didn’t have better jobs to go to, we stayed and we get paid to be here where as most people are volunteers so I have no friends. I hate my job. People call me telling me to save their lives but the truth is I just can’t. I wish I could tell you how brilliant things are and lists reasons for you to live but I can’t.”

Chester clears his throat.

And Brad says. “If you hang up and call back somebody better will help you. But the truth is, you and me are the same. Nobody would miss me if I went away either.” He says, “Now it’s your turn.”

There’s silence for a while then Chester drops another coin into the phone. “I hate myself so much that nobody can love me. I’m gay so my family won’t speak to me. My arms are so scarred I have to wear long sleeves twenty four seven. I don’t know why things are this way, it’s not like anything really bad happened, I just woke up one day and cried until I got drunk and passed out.”

This could be any of the calls he has taken over the last year. Brad says, “You’re gay?”

“Yeah. You can hang up now if you want.”

“No! I was just curious. I get how lonely it can be when your family abandons you because you’re gay. My parents were very religious and it didn’t go down too well. You know, that old cliché.”

Neither of them say anything for a while. There’s just the sound of the rain and Chester’s laboured breathing. He isn’t crying anymore, but his ever breath is shuddering and full of sadness.

Then Brad says, “So what are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna go home, I’m gonna take a shower, then I’m gonna go to bed.”

“And get up the next day right?”

“Right.”

The pips start, and Chester digs in his pocket for another coin. He pulls out lint and nothing. And Brad is going “Hello? Chester are you there?”

And Chester says “I’m here!”

But then the line goes dead.

And Brad is saying to his head set, “Chester? Hello?!”

And Chester is slamming the receiver into the wall and cursing every deity under the sun.

The rain has stopped, though. And the fist that was gripping his heart so tight he felt like he was having a heart attack has eased and he can breathe again.

And maybe it’s just that the alcohol has worn off.

But more likely this is because of Brad.

So Chester tears the sticker from the wall and shoves it in his pocket and pushes the doors of the phone booth open, and walks out, walks home.

***

Brad dials star sixty nine and calls the number back and curses loudly when the phone just rings and rings and rings in the empty phone booth.

“Mother fucker.” He hisses and slams his phone down.

The guy in the next booth stands up and glares down over the partition saying, “Do you mind?”

“No,” Brad says. “Do you swallow?”

And the guy just scowls and drops back into his seat.

“Fucking volunteers.” Brad scowls, and goes back to twisting the Rubik’s cube.

***

Chester sits on the floor of his apartment the next day with a knife and the phone. He calls the suicide hotline over and over and over but it’s never Brad who picks up. Eventually he gives up and presses the tip of the knife into his wrist.

He does little else all day but call the hotline and sit in the shell of his living room with its lack of furniture and broken TV.

And then at eleven thirty at night Brad picks up. Chester doesn’t introduce himself again, or even hint on that he is as needy as he is. He just says, “Do you ever feel like you’re wasting your life?”

He says, “Do you ever think about when you were a kid and you wanted to be a fireman and save people? Do you ever think how you probably disappointed a lot of people by becoming nothing special?”

He says, “I can’t get a job because I’m too busy hating myself all day to fit in anything else. Nobody will employ me because of my arms and the way I get upset at every little thing. I can’t handle pressure, so I can’t drive.”

He says, “My life is just me sitting in my cheap apartment with no friends and nobody who gives a shit. My life is just one big waste of time and I can’t think of one reason not to kill myself right now.”

He says, “I’m going to the beach right now and I’m going to walk into the water until I can’t anymore. I’m going to walk straight down from the Chinese restaurant on the promenade and kill myself. And if someone came to save me then that would be okay. And if they didn’t then that would be okay too.”

And then he hangs up.

He gets his stuff together and he walks to the beach.

***

Brad says he has an upset stomach. His boss gives him a look of disbelief so Brad hurries to the bathroom and makes realistic up-chuck sound effects until he is told he can go home. But of course he doesn’t go home. He jumps in his car and drives to the beach.

A lot of people who call, they need the cry-for-attention-hotline. A lot of them could do worse things than kill themselves. But every now and again there’s people like Chester who he is willing to drive thirty minutes to the beach to save.

This guy could be really ugly. He could be a psycho killer. But Brad couldn’t care less.

He parks in the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant and hurries down the steps to the sand. It’s dark by now, the water in front of him just black. And there’s some guy sitting on the sand, knees drawn up to his chest.

Brad walks down hesitantly. How will he even know if this is Chester?

Then he figures, what does it matter?

And goes, “Hey.”

The guy glances over his shoulder and even in the dark Brad can see he has been crying. He says to the crying guy, “Are you Chester?”

The guy turns away to watch the ocean again and nods. “Didn’t think you’d really come.” He says. “It means a lot. That you did.”

Brad sits down beside Chester and mimics his body language, drawing his knees up to his chest and resting his chin on them. “I don’t have any good reason for you not to kill yourself.” He says and for the first time he is being honest and not an awkward dick head. “The truth is we don’t live in a beautiful world, nothing is like the movies. And maybe you’ll always be unemployed, and maybe I’ll always work in a call centre. Maybe we’re not all destined for bigger things.”

The sky is dabbled with stars and it’s beautiful in an ironic kind of way.

“People call me up and ask if there’s a heaven and I tell them no. No, there’s no God, there’s just this life. So waste it if you like, it’s all you have. But maybe there is another life after this, and maybe it’s in that one that we will be millionaires. The pair of us, we’ll be like…we’ll be rock stars in another life. We’ll have a great band and we’ll do nothing but have fun. But maybe we won’t.” He turns to look at Chester who is staring at the stars. “Maybe this life is all we have. But it’s your decision.”

Maybe this is everything now.

Maybe we’ll go out with a bang. Probably, though, we won’t. Somebody once told Brad that the only thing you can be certain of in life is death – when you meet somebody you can guarantee one day they’ll be worm food.

Maybe we’ll all be left behind whilst everybody goes off to live better lives in Heaven or whatever.

Maybe not.

“So.” Brad says after too much silence. “What’s the decision?”

And Chester says, “I won’t ask you to save me. It isn’t up to anybody else to save me. And maybe you’re right about our next life. Until then, though, you could come back to my place.” He turns his head and meets Brad’s eyes and they’re still wet with tears even though his voice is steady. Chester has the aura of someone who cries a lot – somebody who can pull their shit together quickly when it’s time to answer the phone to concerned parents after hours of laying curled up on the bathroom floor bawling their eyes out.

“I’d love to come home with you.” Brad whispers. But what he really means is I’d love to save you.

Chester seems to understand.

And under the stars they kiss.


End file.
